Let’s Not Get Taken for a Ride

Come August, about 35,000 visitors are expected to arrive in Los Angeles to attend the Democratic National Convention. Many of them will arrive at LAX and will look to take a taxi into town.

The city of Los Angeles needs to make sure that they can get a cab promptly, and one driven at the least by someone who knows where he’s going.

Here’s a fine how-do-you-do to a new visitor to Los Angeles: long walks to the LAX baggage claim areas, long lines to the cab station, and too many taxi drivers who need directions to where they’re going. How about the cabdriver who needed directions from downtown to Pasadena. (Well, there’s this thing called the Pasadena Freeway. . . .) Then there was the first-time visitor arriving at LAX who got a driver who needed directions to Wilshire and La Brea. Head in any mostly north-northeast direction from the airport and you’ll run into one of those streets by sheer chance. Then there are the drivers who think that, no matter where you are heading from LAX, the congested 405 freeway is the only route to start with. Then there are the cabs with inoperable seatbelts and windows.

Geographically huge Los Angeles has just a little more than 2,000 licensed cabs, and that may increase to about 2,300. For most taxi drivers, it’s a pass-through job, something to do until they can find a safer job with better hours. These are high-turnover jobs, but there ought to be a way to improve on the current hit-or-miss chances.

City and convention planners say they have gone out of their way to ensure that buses and shuttles are available from the 80 hotels across the region to take conventioneers to and from downtown L.A. and that conventioneers will receive vouchers for shuttles from LAX to their hotels.

That’s all fine. Yet city and county officials and convention planners must keep in mind that the taxi ride from the airport will be many visitors’ first impression of Los Angeles. As such, Los Angeles should consider posting rules inside cabs, as they do in New York, that riders have a right to have drivers who are courteous, English-speaking and who know the city streets and the way to major destinations, as well as a cab free of smoke or incense.

That’s not too much to ask; it’s the least Los Angeles taxi riders should demand.